Late Author Phillip Roth's UWS Home Hits Market: Report

UPPER WEST SIDE, NY — The Upper West Side home of renowned author Phillip Roth has hit the real estate market nearly one year after his death, according to reports.

Roth lived in a West 79th Street condo after combining two of the building's units in 2004, the Wall Street Journal reported. The home is asking $3.2 million and its listing is being handled by Lisa Lippman of the real estate agency Brown Harris Stevens, according to the report.

The home's current condition is almost exactly as Roth left it after his May 2018 death, the Journal reported. Roth's 1998 Pulitzer Prize for "American Pastoral" is even displayed on one of the home's desks, according to the report.

Roth's connection to the home began in 1989 when he bought a unit in the West 79th Street building to use as a writing studio, the Journal reported. After a messy divorce, Roth used the space as a pied-à-terre while living full-time in Connecticut. When Roth returned to the city, he bought the unit next to his writing stdio and combined the apartments into their current form, the Journal reported.

Up until Roth's death in 2018 he was a prominent figure on the Upper West Side.

"He was a revered figure," Roth's biographer Blake Bailey told the Wall Street Journal. "There’s a lot very literate Jews on the Upper West Side. That’s his milieu."

In a career that spanned more than 50 years and included books such as "Goodbye, Columbus," "Portnoy's Complaint," and "The Plot Against America," Roth, who had homes in Manhattan and Connecticut, won almost every literary prize imaginable – except the Nobel Prize for Literature.

He first burst onto the literary scene in 1959 when The Paris Review literary magazine published his novella, "Goodbye, Columbus."

Raised in a middle class Jewish family in Newark, NJ, Roth used his background as a prism through which he presented many of the issues confronting the country. In "Goodbye, Columbus" it was the story of people trapped between tradition and change.

Read Patch's full Roth obituary here